McGill Philosophy ~ Cambridge Philosophy

Research

Epistemology

My primary area of research is the semantics
of knowledge attributions, located at the interface between
epistemology and the philosophy of language. I have recently published a monograph
(Knowledge and Presuppositions) in which I
explicate my views on epistemic contextualism and propose a
novel account that resolves a number of pertinent problems that
have attracted much attention in the recent literature.

My current work in this area is on a new monograph,
provisionally entitled The Semantics of Knowledge
Attributions (under contract with Oxford University
Press). This second monograph will be the first comprehensive
and book-length examination of the debate on knowledge
attributions and will provide a critical overview and
discussion of the literature on views such as epistemic
contextualism, epistemic impurism (subject-sensitive
invariantism; interest-relative invariantism), epistemic
relativism, and strict invariantism. The Semantics of
Knowledge Attributions will supplement Knowledge and
Presuppositions, and taken together the two books will
provide a comprehensive picture of my views in the area.

Besides my work on the semantics of knowledge attributions, I
am interested in a variety of puzzles arising in the area of
epistemology, broadly construed. In the past I have worked on topics such as reliabilism,
closure, safety, Moorean reasoning, dogmatism, epistemic
entitlement, relevant alternatives theory, counter-closure,
inferential reasoning from falsehood, scepticism, and the
analyzability of knowledge. Currently I am interested in
epistemic blamelessness and epistemic rationality, exploring
these notions from the point of view of a knowledge-first
approach to epistemology. New draft papers on these topics will
be available for download in my publications section soon.

Philosophy of Language

While most of my research in epistemology overlaps to a
significant degree with topics in
the philosophy of language, I am also working on issues that
are more traditionally construed as topics in philosophical
linguistics or the philosophy of language. At the moment I am focusing on the
Gricean notion of conversational and conventional implicature
and on the semantics of definite descriptions (defending a
Russellian approach to definite descriptions that combines
Russellianism with aspects of a broadly Fregean presuppositional
account).

Further Projects

I am interested in the notion of evidence in legal contexts and
recently started work on the role of statistical evidence in
courts of law and a number of related puzzles at the interface
between epistemology and legal theory.

Quotes

"Precision is often regarded as a hyper-cautious characteristic. It is
importantly the opposite. Vague statements are the hardest to
convict of error. Obscurity is the oracle’s self-defence. To be
precise is to make it as easy as possible for others to prove one
wrong. That is what requires courage. But the community can lower
the cost of precision by keeping in mind that precise errors often
do more than vague truths for scientific progress." -Timothy
Williamson

"With philosophical as well as scientific theories, one may explain
one’s theoretical concepts, not by defining them, but by using them
to account for the phenomena." -Robert Stalnaker